New Delhi: The Maharashtra chief electoral officer – the highest ranking representative of the Election Commission in the state – has requested that electoral registration officers be allowed to exercise their own discretion in four areas of the special intensive revision of the voter list. EROs are allowed by the law to take a call on these decisions, but the centrally-controlled ECINet software has taken this power from them – a fact that was highlighted in the Indian Express revelations on the formal concerns expressed by the Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi over this.Indian Express now reports that Maharashtra CEO S Chockalingam has requested that EROs be allowed to decide which “logical discrepancy” cases need a hearing, what documents to accept and which discrepancies they can dispose of themselves. Crucially, the CEO asked for written FAQs explaining the notice, document submission, hearing and disposal process. He said that “oral instructions from ECI or CEO are insufficient”.The CEO’s letter came a day after the first batch of investigations were made public by the newspaper last week. The report says that they were addressed to Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg, Director General of IT Seema Khanna and two secretariat officers.The Maharashtra draft roll which was published August 31, cut 21.1% of the state’s electors and its final roll is due on November 16.The “logical discrepancy” category was introduced in the SIR in Bengal. It indicates a discrepancy flagged by a software – the ECINET. As proven in Bengal and Delhi, this software is unforgiving and erroneous. It has kept lakhs of voters out over spelling transliteration errors, what it considers age ‘mismatches’ between a child and a parent (under 15 years or over 50), incorrect age progression between documents, and the submission of only Aadhaar.As reported by The Indian Express, EC Sandhu wrote on August 14 that CEOs, DEOs and EROs, the statutory authorities for the voters’ list, were reporting they could not perform their duties, and that their powers were “curtailed by centralised control of ERONet at DG(IT) level.” “It is strange,” he said, “that all the responsibilities regarding Electoral Roll lie on EROS, DEOs and CEOs as per law, but the access control has been centralised by DG(IT).”As the Express report notes, The Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 assign responsibility for the electoral roll to the Electoral Registration Officer who will oversee an assembly seat each.The report says:An ERO is usually the sub-divisional magistrate or an officer of equivalent rank in the district administration. The ERO prepares the voters’ list, hears claims and objections and decides which names will stay and which get deleted. This is a deliberately decentralised system. For decades, the ECI has leaned on that design to answer political allegations of mass manipulation of electoral rolls. No single person is supposed to control the voters’ list.The report notes that CEO Chockalingam requested an option in the ECINet page for EROs which allows them to waive a hearing for voters who submit “valid and satisfactory documents,” so that senior citizens, the disabled and “other vulnerable groups” are spared “unnecessary inconvenience and apprehension”.Notably, the CEO also said that while the 13 documents listed on the back of the SIR notice are “indicative and not exhaustive,” the software needs to allow a separate group of documents seeing that electors from tribal, homeless and sex-worker communities “may not able to provide any document from the indicative list”.The CEO also asked for EROs to be able to decide cases where supporting documents are sent to the district election officer for verification.He also noted that the ECINet currently requires an “Extract of Last SIR” to be uploaded in every discrepancy case which need not be mandatory at all as the discrepancy is already identified using the last SIR roll.In its initial September 23 response to the investigation, the Election Commission appeared to duck the most important concerns regarding the ECINet software, saying:“The Commission’s digital platforms, such as ECINet, operate under strict data security protocols to prevent unauthorized tampering, manipulation, etc. IT security checks and audit controls are standard cybersecurity measures implemented across national databases. Statutory authorities, including Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and District Election Officers (DEOs), function as per statutory powers for registration and deletion under law.”On September 26, after a meeting of the full Commission, the statement it released partially addressed requests made by the Maharashtra CEO and gave EROs the discretion to exempt people flagged for logical discrepancies from personal hearings. It also said “various upgradations of the portal have already been made based on the inputs from State CEOs in the past few months,” and that “in case any further flexibility is required by the field officers, that will be made operational”.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.